I‘m reading as much as I can these days between sneezes (whew, the pollen this year!), especially poetry! If you’d like to celebrate National Poetry Month with a brand new collection, check out these new Southern titles — plus some nonfiction written by beloved poets.
a little bump in the earth
By Tyree Daye
April 2, 2024
Copper Canyon: “Tyree Daye’s a little bump in the earth is an act of invention and remembrance. Through sprawling poems, the town of Youngsville, North Carolina, where Daye’s family has lived for the last 200 years, is reclaimed as ‘Ritual House.’ a little bump in the earth explores what it means to love someone, someplace, even as it changes, dies right in front of your eyes. Poem by poem, Daye is honoring the people of Youngsville and ‘bringing back the dead.’”
Stones
By Kevin Young
April 2, 2024
Knopf: “Whether it’s the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young’s home places and his dear departed, and to what of them — of us — poetry can save.”
Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves
By J. Drew Lanham
April 2, 2024
Hub City: “In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division.”
After
By Geoffrey Brock
April 9, 2024
Paul Dry Books: “Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but clearly separate tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it’s a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets are indebted to other poets as surely as each of us is indebted to those who raised us, and the poems in After attempt to account for such personal and poetic inheritances.”
The House of Being
By Natasha Trethewey
April 9, 2024
Yale University Press: “In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit ‘so that my story would not be determined for me.’ She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.”
Kitchen Apocrypha
By Gregory Emilio
April 12, 2024
Able Muse: “Gregory Emilio’s Kitchen Apocrypha delves richly and sensuously into food as sustenance, ritual, pleasure, and temptation. Drawing upon his food service experiences, Emilio contemplates hunger, abundance, community, and solitude through the lens of culinary arts. He navigates meals ranging from sacred family recipes to unassuming roadside diners, sprinkling biblical and mythological allusions throughout. Central to his narrative is a deep reverence for food’s power to nourish not just the body, but the spirit and human connection as well.”
PlayHouse
By Jorrell Watkins
April 15, 2024
Curbstone Books: “Jorrell Watkins’ debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States’ fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in PlayHouse embody many identities, including son, brother, fugitive, bluesman, karate practitioner, and witness. Throughout, Watkins inflects a Black/trap vernacular that defamiliarizes the urban Southern landscape. Across three sections of poetry scored by hip-hop, blues, and trap, Watkins considers how music is a dwelling and wonders which histories, memories, and people haunt each home.”
Deer Black Out
By Ulrich Jesse K. Baer
April 16, 2024
Red Hen Press: “Deer Black Out is a(n obsessional re) mediation of violence and trauma through the trans/coalescence of identities surfacing and resurfacing within a manuscript of serialized poetry, influenced by HD, Zukofsky, and Ronald Johnson. It’s sort of like a body, the movement of which you can only recognize emerging within a field of static. Just the outlines. A deer! In ramifying lines, this poetry creates a self-reciprocating dialogue with the very act of self-replication. The language exists as the prosthetic support that co-creates and conditions the Baerself’s emergence into the real.”
One Wild Word Away
By Geffrey Davis
April 23, 2024
BOA: “When tensions veer between hope and despair, the ensuing fracture can swing like a scythe and cut a ragged seam between past and present. In One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis weaves a deft set of poems about illness, family, loss, and rebirth. The luxurious sonics and crisp descriptions in each line are haunted by grief and buoyed by love as the speaker confronts generational trauma and the potential loss of a loved one while in the process of raising his own son.”
Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees
By Aimee Nezhukumatathil
April 30, 2024
Ecco: “In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances — a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities and explores the boundaries between heritage and memory.”
Southern Review of Books 